The Australian BioCommons integrates the tools, methods and training required to advance bioinformatics capacity for Australia’s life scientists. This is achieved through a combination of integration and development across the BioCommons infrastructure partners, the provision of community supported tool and workflow sets on both command line and graphical user interface platforms, as well as a national training effort.
To achieve a fit-for-purpose outcome, we need to identify the requirements of many thousands of geographically dispersed researchers, and use this to deliver useful infrastructure. Strong user engagement is paramount to understand community needs and direct the deployment and resourcing of appropriate infrastructure to ensure maximum impact.
The BioCommons have developed a five step process to maximise interaction with the community, from initial consultation, to deployment of solutions:
1. Identify existing communities of manageable scope;
2. Analyse the community area, in consultation with its members, to understand its broad needs and challenges;
3. Communicate with the broad community, inclusive of everyone from any expertise level or any institution, to identify issues, roadblocks and solutions/suggestions through electronic surveys, shared discussion boards and virtual meetings;
4. Document and distill the challenges, and in discussion with infrastructure specialists, detail conceptual solutions supported by a subset of the community;
5. Deploy and implement solutions with testing and feedback from the community.
Through this engagement process, the Australian BioCommons has identified and then coordinated work to address the absence of essential infrastructure to support critical communities (e.g. those undertaking genome annotation). The method is now being applied to engage a diverse range of communities, including proteomics.
Visit https://www.biocommons.org.au/proteomics for more information or to join the conversation.